"I hope my heart explodes," John Darnielle sang in "Twin Human Highway Flares" on Wednesday night, and that's a danger that seems perpetual for the Mountain Goats. Darnielle's manic sincerity would obliterate lesser material; instead, the singer-songwriter has built a career on transmuting tragedy and survival into catharsis and even joy.

At Wonder Ballroom, playing with longtime bassist Peter Hughes, Darnielle played a brisk set that stretched back through nearly 20 years, to the material of 1997's "Full Force Gambit" and 2002's "All Hail West Texas." Darnielle has a journalist's eye and a novelist's wit, and his compositions -- whether covering fictionalized narratives or his own darker moments -- communicate feelings too real to ignore. Darnielle is a folk singer and his songs are rarely more than a few chords, but they may never pass into canon: they're too specific, too dependent on his impassioned delivery and personal gravity.

He regaled the sold-out crowd with stories of past traumas presented as lessons learned: seeing wrestler Roddy Piper after his parents' divorce and living blocks from the Wonder in Northeast Portland, years before he'd return to play to fans who knew every word of songs such as "No Children." It always gets better in Mountain Goats songs, most of all in "You Were Cool," the unreleased track the duo opened the first of two encores with. An ode to a high school outcast that wonders if she, too, made it through, the song's the Platonic ideal of the message of solidarity Darnielle's been sending his listeners for so long: “People were mean to you, but I always thought you were cool.”

North Carolina rockers Loamlands opened the show, with singer Kym Register's twangy vocals a bright pleasure. The band's material was as memorable as a can of PBR, though, never stretching past Creedence Clearwater Revival revisitation. One song seemed like it would riff its way into Led Zeppelin's "Over the Hills and Far Away"; alas, it never made the climb.